OpenID momentum continues to grow. Yahoo! announced that Google users can now sign up for a new account on Flickr’s photo-sharing service with their Google Account information, eliminating the need to create a new username and password. Flickr joins other websites such as Plaxo and Facebook that also support this simpler registration process for Google users.

Google and Yahoo! are two of the many companies who have been involved with the OpenID community’s efforts to improve the process for how users log in and sign up for online services. For example, last month Google announced its use of OpenID to make it simpler for Yahoo! users to sign up for Google services.

While Google doesn’t yet support the use of OpenID for replacing passwords on its own sites, we’re involved in the OpenID community’s efforts to research how to best implement that type of support. Yahoo!’s announcement today is another step in defining those best practices. We look forward to discussing this new feature at next week’s Internet Identity Workshop where the identity community gathers to discuss how to further accelerate the adoption of standards like OpenID.

One of the things that makes Google TV different is that it has an Internet browser built-in so users have full access to the entire web on their television screens. Over the past few months, we’ve had many developers come to us seeking guidance on how to make their existing websites even better for the 10-foot TV experience. Many have even come to us with completely new designs for their existing websites.

For developers, building websites for TV is a new opportunity for creativity and provides a distribution channel to reach users in a new way. For users, better and more interesting websites mean that the overall Google TV experience gets even better. We know that developers must be at the heart of our ecosystem, building cool experiences for audiences to watch and enjoy, and we want to encourage a new generation of TV developers to come forward. Which is why, over the next few weeks, we are planning to give away 10,000 Google TV devices to help developers start building for TV.

This morning, we gave away more than 3,000 Google TV devices to attendees of the Adobe MAX conference. Additionally, we’ll be reaching out to thousands of web developers in the Google Code community to offer them a free device. Finally, if you are a professional web developer who wants to help make the Google TV experience even better and you don’t happen to fall into one of those two groups, please submit an entry to our Google TV Web Developer Promotion and include a short summary about the type of interesting website your company would like to create or optimize for Google TV. We’re planning to select 2,500 winners from those entries to receive a free Google TV device.

For a bit of inspiration, check out some of the latest Spotlight sites that have just launched on Google TV. A few of our favorites include Net-A-Porter, which lets you watch runway videos and shop for high fashion; Meegenius, a place where you can read and customize children’s books; TuneIn, a personal radio for your TV; and The Onion, which always gives us a good laugh.

To get started building websites for Google TV, we’ve provided new documentation and a Google TV Web forum to help developers better engage in the process. We’re excited to see what you all come up with. Happy coding!

Update on 10/27: To clarify, this giveaway is only for U.S based developers. We hope to make Google TV available in other markets soon.

Google Developer Day Japan on September 28 welcomed 1700 attendees across Tokyo and a satellite location in Kyoto.

During our keynote presentation, we shared updates and demos for each of our global priority areas: Android, Chrome & HTML5 and Cloud Computing. To watch the keynote video, go to http://youtube.com/GoogleDevelopersJa (keynote starts 5 minutes in, some parts will be in Japanese). Thanks to our Japanese developer community, Japan is the 2nd largest global market for Android app uploads and App Engine usage. We were happy to share that worldwide, Android is now at 200,000 activations per day and App Engine is at 90,000 active developers per month. We announced an open source font for Mac OS and support for the Japanese Transliteration API.

We also welcomed over 30 Sandbox developers and hosted 22 technical sessions, with speakers from both Google Mountain View and Google Tokyo. Two additional highlights at GDD Japan were the Android-based Android robot, built by one of the Sandbox developers, and the Chrome bento lunch box.

Coming up very soon are the rest of our Developer Days, which will take place on:

Earlier this year at Google I/O, we announced a collaboration between Google and VMware focused on making it easy to build business-oriented, cloud portable web apps. We showed how businesses could use our integrated developer tools to build modern web apps that are “cloud ready” from the start, and can be deployed to any standard environment, including Google App Engine and on VMware vFabric on-premise solutions. Today we are happy to announce that these tools will be generally available within the next few weeks.

Of course, if you’re itching to get a head start, you can jump right in by downloading the release candidate version of SpringSource Tool Suite.

If you’d prefer to wait for the general release, you can sign up to be notified as soon as they are available.

The list of developer tools includes that are available as part of this collaboration include:

Spring Roo and Google Web Toolkit - Spring Roo, a next generation rapid application development tool, combined with the power of Google Web Toolkit (GWT) enables developers to build rich browser apps in enterprise production environments. These GWT-powered applications leverage modern browser technologies such as AJAX and HTML5 to create the most compelling end-user experience on both desktops and mobile browsers.

Spring Insight and Google Speed Tracer - Google’s Speed Tracer with VMware’s Spring Insight performance tracing technology enable end-to-end performance visibility into cloud applications. This integration provides a holistic view into the web application performance, improving the end-user experience by optimizing the client side as well as the server side.

SpringSource Tool Suite and Google Plugin for Eclipse - The integration of SpringSource Tool Suite and the Google Plugin for Eclipse makes it easy for developers to build and maintain large scale, web-based, enterprise applications, putting tools that were previously only available when building desktop and server solutions in the hands of those building cutting edge web apps.

Both teams are excited about the strides we can make in the mobile web app space. As it stands today, the current technology stack makes it possible to create optimized web apps targeted for the mobile browser. Longer term, we will be looking at incorporating mobile best practices, styled UIs, and HTML5 features such as app cache, local database storage, and geolocation to make the developer and end-user experience first class.

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback and thoughts on this release. Our GWT developer forum is the best place to post this information. Happy coding!

Last week Jason Grigsby visited Google as part of our Web Exponents speaker series which highlights innovations in web technology. Jason is a tech leader in mobile web development. In addition to spotting trends in the mobile space, Jason is at the front lines building mobile apps at Cloud Four. His humorous and informative talk includes technology recommendations and insightful examples from the world of mobile. Check out the video of the talk below. You can also download the slides.

Jason’s mobile strategy counterexamples include Chanel (they have an iPhone app but their website is unusable on the iPhone) and the difficulties of finding an Apple Store on the iPhone. His DOs and DON’Ts are:

DOs:

Know your customers and what devices they use.

Look beyond native apps to mobile web, SMS & MMS.

Apps for your most loyal customers add value.

Consistent experience across devices and offline.

Understand mobile context.

DON’Ts:

Don’t assume customers have downloaded your app.

Don’t rely on Flash.

Don’t make finding store locations & hours difficult.

Simple to use does not mean dumb.

Don’t forget that the ‘U’ in URL stands for Universal. (He goes on to point out that it really stands for Uniform.)

These all ring true for anyone with experience building for mobile. The hard part is figuring out the right solution for providing the right experience for desktop as well as diverse mobile devices. Jason gives a glimpse into the key features of a solution:

integrated image resizing

video conversion and resizing

separation of content from markup so content can be used in native apps

prioritization of content based on context

full-featured APIs

The challenge in my opinion is in the steps of breaking out content from markup and determining which content is appropriate for a given device. We need frameworks that better support these ideas, but there’s still a lot of heavy design work on the developer’s shoulders. Jason points to NPR as an example of a large site that has successfully implemented this architecture. Check out Jason’s talk to find out more, and also check out some of the other videos in the Web Exponents playlist.

One of the things we enjoy most at Google is working with talented developers around the world, whether Googlers at one of our many global offices or developers using our APIs to build great products. With today’s App Tuesday we’re excited to introduce some new apps to the Google Apps Marketplace with roots outside the United States.

With the addition of these apps, Google Apps customers now have easy access to apps from 25 countries outside the United States, including Australia, Germany, India, Russia, Singapore and more. While the initial version of the Google Apps Marketplace Billing API will only be available to US sellers, we want all developers to be able to integrate with Google Apps and sell their business-focused web apps on the Apps Marketplace. Because of this, we recently modified our revenue sharing exemption period to last until 3 months after the release of the Marketplace Billing APIs for a country where you are located. So, if you would like to build an app for the Google Apps Marketplace, Get Started now.

Since Python is one of our more popular languages, we’ve updated the Google Analytics Python Client Library to access all 5 feeds of the Management API. Now it’s easier than ever to get your configuration data from the API.

To show you how simple it is to use the library, here is an example which returns all the goal names for a profile: